Much of Stewart Hulse's career was spent analyzing how animals can extract patterned information from sequences of stimuli. Yet an additional form of information contained in a sequence may be the number of times different elements occurred. Experiments that required numerical discrimination between different stimulus items presented in sequence…

The response-signal speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure was used to provide an in-depth investigation of the impact of aging on the dynamics of short-term memory retrieval. Young and older adults studied sequentially presented 3-item lists, immediately followed by a recognition probe. Analyses of composite list and serial position SAT…

In practice, the sum of the item scores is often used as a basis for comparing subjects. For items that have more than two ordered score categories, only the partial credit model (PCM) and special cases of this model imply that the subjects are stochastically ordered on the common latent variable. However, the PCM is very restrictive with respect…

The law of prior entry states that attended objects come to consciousness more quickly than unattended ones. This has been well established in spatial cueing paradigms, where two task-relevant stimuli are presented near-simultaneously at two different locations. Here, we suggest that prior entry also plays a pivotal role in temporal attention…

Several studies on free recall suggest that processes responsible for recall are analogous to processes responsible for rehearsal. In children, the relationship between cumulative rehearsal and recall performance has been proven to be critical; however, the locus of the effect of rehearsal is not yet fully understood. To unfold the mechanisms that…

The formula [image omitted] is closely related to combinatorics through an elementary geometric exercise. This approach can be expanded to the formulas [image omitted], [image omitted] and [image omitted]. These formulas are also nice examples of showing two approaches, one algebraic and one combinatoric, to a problem of counting. (Contains 6…

In transparent orthographies like German, isolated learning disabilities in either reading or spelling are common and occur as often as a combined reading and spelling disability. However, most issues surrounding the cognitive causes of these isolated or combined literacy difficulties are yet unresolved. Recently, working memory dysfunctions have…

The study investigated the impact of item position in multiple-choice test on student performance at the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) level in Ghana. The sample consisted of 810 Junior Secondary School (JSS) Form 3 students selected from 12 different schools. A quasi-experimental design was used. The instrument for the project…

A model of short-term memory and episodic memory is presented, with the core assumptions that (a) people parse their continuous experience into episodic clusters and (b) items are clustered together in memory as episodes by binding information within an episode to a common temporal context. Along with the additional assumption that information…

Single linear virtual timelines have been used effectively with undergraduates and primary school children to convey the chronological ordering of historical items, improving on PowerPoint and paper/textual displays. In the present study, a virtual environment (VE) consisting of three parallel related timelines (world history and the histories of…

Elicitation techniques are a category of research tasks that use visual, verbal, or written stimuli to encourage participants to talk about their ideas. These tasks are particularly useful for exploring topics that may be difficult to discuss in formal interviews, such as those that involve sensitive issues or rely on tacit knowledge. Elicitation…

This study addressed pedagogical practices in the public speaking classroom in an attempt to help control communication apprehension (CA) levels and improve retention rates among college students in the basic public speaking course. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of Berger and Calabrese's uncertainty reduction theory and Weiner's attribution…

Geologic time scale is a very important concept for understanding long-term earth system events such as climate change. This study examines forty-three 4th-8th grade Native American--particularly Ojibwe tribe--students' understanding of relative ordering and absolute time of Earth's significant geological and biological events. This study also…

In perception, divided attention refers to conditions in which multiple stimuli are relevant to an observer. To measure the effect of divided attention in terms of perceptual capacity, we introduce an extension of the simultaneous-sequential paradigm. The extension makes predictions for fixed-capacity models as well as for unlimited-capacity…

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) show deficits in phoneme binding in immediate serial recall: when attempting to reproduce a sequence of words that they no longer fully understand, they show frequent migrations of phonemes between items (e.g., cap, frog recalled as "frap, cog"). This suggests that verbal short-term memory emerges directly from…